The Glossy 50 honors the year’s biggest changemakers across fashion and beauty. More from the series →
In June, men’s personal care brand Dr. Squatch was acquired by Unilever for $1.5 billion, making it one of the biggest deals in beauty and personal care this year.
“I joined the company back when we were just a four-person startup [in 2019] working from an apartment in Venice [Beach, California],” said Dr. Squatch CEO Josh Friedman. “It’s been an incredible journey, and we continue to just see huge potential.”
Dr. Squatch launched in 2014 with a comedy-first approach to marketing its more-natural, affordable body care to men. It sells deodorant, soap, lotion, hair care and fragrance, among other products, through wide distribution that includes Walgreens, Walmart, Target, Amazon and Kroger, along with its own e-commerce channel.
“[Since launch] we’ve had this broader goal of redefining how men approach personal care,” Friedman said. “[Our goal was to get men to] care about the products they’re using and the brand they’re associating themselves with.” Dr. Squatch has found runaway success by also injecting passion and excitement into the category, he said.
This has been fueled by the brand’s natural-is-better approach to ingredients; manly-coded branding, including the mystical creature Sasquatch as its mascot; and high-profile partnerships with comedian James Schrader, boxer Mike Tyson, actress Sydney Sweney, actor Alan Ritchson and NFL player Justin Herbert, among others.
The brand launched in Walmart in 2021 after achieving 400% sales growth and, according to many industry experts, is consistently Walmart’s top-selling men’s brand. In 2024, the company had around $90 million in annual sales and a $2 billion valuation. In June, it was acquired by Unilever in a $1.5 billion deal with private equity owner Summit Partners.
The company’s top channels in 2025 were retail are brick-and-mortar, followed by DTC, then Amazon, Friedman said. “We are a very multi-channel business, more so than many of our peers,” he told Glossy. “That lends itself to a continuous focus on where we’re putting the resources of the company.”
Friedman pulled several growth levers in 2025, starting with launching body wash, now a top seller, and expanding internationally to Canada, Australia and the U.K. Still, the brand’s sales leaders remain soap and deodorant, served up with a side of clever branding and marketing.
“We’re going to have some of the biggest marketing moments to date [in 2026], aimed at this goal of expanding awareness,” Friedman said. “2026 will be splashier than ever, … especially now with the support of Unilever. We want to make Dr. Squatch an icon brand that is known in every household across the United States and beyond.”
